


Bad Timing

by FreshLinguine



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Minor Violence, Non-Graphic Violence, Romantic Soulmates, Slight Canon Divergence, Soulmate-Identifying Timers, Soulmates, character backstory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-17 09:48:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11849040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FreshLinguine/pseuds/FreshLinguine
Summary: Aurelio never thought that he would meet his soulmate some 200 years into the future. He thought wrong.





	Bad Timing

**Author's Note:**

> SO I wanted to write a Soulmate AU for a while. I started off with the identification mark being like. Where you would meet your soulmate. That version was sadly abandoned but I might pick it back up and try to finish it (just because I love soulmate AU's lmao).
> 
> This one might also have a second chapter! I didn't really like how this one ended since it didn't really give Aurelio closure, if that makes sense. We'll see. 
> 
> Anyway, comments are always welcome and I hope y'all enjoy!!
> 
> EDIT: decided to leave this as a oneshot. i'm probably gonna edit it at some point but idk
> 
> EDIT: As of 11/5/2018, I have plans to write a follow-up chapter. I also rewrote the first chapter! More descriptive, better in general. And formatting changes! Wow! Mostly because I don't feel like bothering trying to indent the paragraphs right now. Again, comments appreciated!

Aurelio thought that the timer on the inside of his forearm had to be a cruel joke by whatever divine being made soul marks. He had done the calculations over and over again throughout his life. The timer on his arm was supposedly telling him that he would meet his soulmate in 200 some years in the future.

Covering the mark up with his sleeve as a child, and slowly learning to ignore it as an adult. He tried to move it to the back of his mind as he got older, ignoring the stares and the comments made by others throughout his life. No one could explain it, and until they could, Aurelio tried not to listen.

It didn’t take long for him to decide not to wait on someone who he’d never meet and get on with his life. Some people become obsessed with finding their soulmates and, in spite of this obsession, many of them never meet them. Aurelio tried not to be cynical, tried not to look down on those people, but how could he not be a little cold when his timer was ticking down to a moment that would never come?

After his service, Aurelio met a girl with the same practical thought about soul marks. Her name was Nora, she said, and they exchanged phone numbers that night in the dimly lit club they met. She was the most beautiful girl he’d ever met, Aurelio thought, her curly hair grazing her shoulder blades and her eyes a vibrant brown. As he grew to know her, Aurelio also thought that Nora was the kindest woman he had ever met. She didn’t mind his scars left over from his service, both literal and metaphorical. She was soft and sensitive to everything she interacted with.

Sometimes Aurelio would stare at Nora’s back as she slept beside him. On nights that his mind would race, a thousand thoughts a minute going through his head, seeing her beside him was comforting. It was grounding.

One night, he spotted the timer on her arm, usually kept hidden behind long sleeved shirts. It had stopped, not having counted down to zero. In a weird way, it made him feel like they were meant to be together. Aurelio never wanted to wait on someone he would never meet, and it seemed that Nora had similar ideas.

He never asked her about her timer.

Aurelio’s timer slowly became less and less relevant to him. He had married the love of his life in the spring and was a father by autumn. He became more involved in politics as the war began to turn sour, frequenting meeting halls to discuss politics with fellow veterans after work. He fell into this normalcy quickly. Nothing was going to change soon.

Aurelio didn’t anticipate the atom bomb.

Pulled from his life, Aurelio tried to remain optimistic as he and Nora made their way into Vault 111. Running up to the entrance and then witnessing the bomb drop nearby. _This will be the new normal_ , he thought. Raising his family in a nuclear fallout shelter. Underground. Never to see the light of day again. He’ll figure out how to cope with the bomb viewing. _Just another trauma to add to the pile_ , he figured.

Some concerns were raised, however, when he was ushered into (what looked like) a pod. No amount of scientists telling you “it’s fine” will make it 100% fine. Even more concerns were raised when the pod became colder and colder until Aurelio realized he was being put into some kind of cryogenic stasis for an indefinite period of time.

This certainly wasn’t the best start to life in a vault.

A muffled banging had awoken him from his cryogenic stasis. It was exhausting just to look up and open his eyes, but Aurelio did. From his place across from Nora, he saw her being brought out of her cryo chamber. Aurelio saw her argue with the two people who brought her out of her icy sleep, saw her fight to keep their son in her arms despite her fatigue. Aurelio lurked forward at the sound of a gunshot. He watched Nora slump over in her seat through his hazy vision, falling back asleep, hoping to God he doesn’t wake up again.

He woke up again.

The air of the vault was cold and sterile, everything bathed in a blue light from the fluorescent lights and ice. Wandering its halls, he found the remnants of soldiers and scientists and pieced together what happened after the inhabitants went into cryostasis. Aurelio was the sole survivor of vault 111. Him, and his son.

Ascending out of the earth like an awful parody of a biblical hero, Aurelio got a taste of the drastically changed landscape. It seemed to be autumn, what leaves that were on the trees were orange, brown, and the rare shade of red. There was a chemical smell in the air that Aurelio couldn’t quite place. The crunch of the ground below his boots echoed through the relatively silent landscape. In the distance was the familiar pop of gunfire. Shit, now he’s happy he took that gun off of one of those soldiers. They wouldn’t need it now anyway.

Walking through the forest just outside of his cul-de-sac that was once so green, so alive, the thought occurred to him to check the timer on his arm.

Pulling up the sleeve of his vault suit, Aurelio’s heart skipped a beat. The timer was now down to mere _hours_. Nope. Nope, nope, nope.

He staggered passed the broken chain-link fence up to Sanctuary Hills. The houses were broken, some beyond repair, having collapsed in on themselves years ago. Aurelio was spinning where he stood, uncertain where to look first. He heard the familiar an all too familiar buzzing, his heart now pounding in his ears as Aurelio turned on his heels to face the person (or, robot) that he was hoping to see. Codsworth floated still before Aurelio, a few feet away from him on the broken street. Before he could say anything, Aurelio ran up to him and embraced the cold metal of his body. If Codsworth had the capability to cry, he probably would. Unable to return his employer’s embrace, he opted to talk endlessly about how much he missed him, how he thought Aurelio was gone forever.

Codsworth ushered a now crying Aurelio into what used to be his home. “I tried my best to keep the place together.” Codsworth said, handing Aurelio a bottled water he salvaged not long ago, “but it’s difficult keeping dust and grime out of a home without windows!”

The two let out a small chuckle before a small silence took the both of them.

“Sir, I’m sorry if I’m being indelicate in any way by asking this but your wife, is she..?”

The weight begins to hit him. Aurelio stares at the wall in front of him with dead eyes. “She’s died, Codsworth. Someone killed her and took our son.”

An uncomfortable silence falls over them again. Codsworth hovers in place, unsure of what to say. The bottle in Aurelio’s hands is shaking.

“I…” Aurelio began. Codsworth wavered in the air as the silence between them was broken by his employer’s mumbled words, “Codsworth, I’m going to go for a walk down the road. See what’s out there. I won’t be gone long.”

Codsworth followed Aurelio as he stepped towards the door, “Should I go with you, sir?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“Sir,” Aurelio stopped at the doorframe, looking at the robot, “I’m so happy you’re here. I didn’t think you’d come back. But you did. You did.”

Aurelio smiles over his shoulder before walking out the door of his old home and down the road.

Aurelio fiddled with his pip-boy as he walked over the small wooden bridge leading away from his neighborhood. One of his legs fell through the rotten wooden boards. Already off to a great start. After pulling his leg free, he figured out his pip-boy had a radio feature. The map function was to be deciphered later. He remembered that there was an old gas station nearby, and Concord wasn’t too far away. Maybe a nice walk through the irradiated wasteland was just what he needed. Yeah, definitely.

During his jaunt, he managed to discover giant mole rats were now a thing. While beating them to death with a wooden board, having forgotten about the gun at his hip, he found a dog. A german shepherd, or a mutt that looked startlingly like a german shepherd (Aurelio couldn’t imagine purebreds are much of a thing anymore). It helped catch a few giant mole rats, keeping them in place long enough to hit them. After the awful monstrosities were dealt with, the dog nosed at the gun on his hip, promptly reminding him that _hey dumbass, you have a gun_ but in a very nice, dog-like way. The dog had followed him around the gas station as he salvaged food and garbage that he might be able to MacGyver into something useful. Aurelio thought the dog would stop following him as he walked down to Concord, but it continued to follow him. He was a good dog, possibly the best dog Aurelio had ever met. But Aurelio realized that he might’ve thought that about every dog.

As he and the dog (whom he dubbed Dogmeat) were walking, they ran into some strange looking people. Aurelio thought about trying to talk to them for a moment, but he refrained. Something about these people made him really uncomfortable. It might’ve been the heads on pikes. Or that these people looked like they were wearing bondage gear. Or the way they were now shooting at Aurelio and his new dog.

After hastily reteaching himself how to fire a gun and defeating the bondage-gear-wearing-jackasses, Aurelio noticed that the closer he got to Concord, the more of those types were hanging around. They were all concentrating their fire on the museum at the center of town. The majority of the town consisted of boarded up buildings. Through the broken boards of these buildings, Aurelio could see that they were picked over thoroughly. It was obvious that there was something in the museum that they wanted to get to.

Aurelio soon figured that these people were bad people, judging by the way they aggressively shot at him in the hopes of looting his dead body and possibly desecrating his corpse. He ducked behind a mailbox and picked off the fetishists one by one, trying his best to clear a path to the museum. He tried to hurry, assuming that more of them would show up. He wasn’t sure what could be hiding in these buildings.

Staggering into the center of Concord, partially from the high of fighting and partially from the bullet lodged in his calf, Aurelio noticed his arm beginning to tingle and burn. He was ready to ignore the sensation, just something to be dealt with later like the bullet in his leg, until the feeling started to get _worse_. He scratched and clenched at the skin of his arm through his vault suit, trying to make the unfamiliar sensation stop. Whether by his aggressive scratching or divine punishment, the burning began to feel like someone was holding a match to his skin. Holstering his gun, Aurelio rolled up the sleeve of his vault suit and saw that the timer was now down to mere seconds.

Aurelio looked around frantically. He prayed to whatever divine presence that would listen that his soul mate wasn’t about hop out from behind a car in nothing but leather and hosiery and try to kill him. Aurelio’s head began to spin. Dogmeat nudged Aurelio’s leg with his head in an effort to try to calm him down, whining slightly as he heard Aurelio begin to hyperventilate.

Dogmeat gently bit the arm of Aurelio’s vault suit and guided him to the museum steps. Dogmeat put his head on his lap as Aurelio all but collapsed onto the steps. He’s shaking, oh fuck is he shaking. _This is bullshit_ , Aurelio thought _._ This is jackassery on levels that he hasn’t experienced in a long time.

“Hey!”

Aurelio stumbled and nearly threw up from fear, unintentionally scaring the perfect dog in his lap. He turned his head towards the sound of the voice high above him and saw a man looking down at him from a grimy, open window.

Aurelio broke out into a cold sweat as he made eye contact with him. The weapon in his hands was foreign, something resembling a musket held together by duct tape and faith. His smile was bright and beautiful despite the situation.

“Do you think you can come up here? The stairs are broken and you might need to maneuver through some rooms but…” The beautiful man looking down on Aurelio like some kind of angel stopped as he noticed that Aurelio wasn’t exactly listening, giving him a kind of astounded fish-like look.

“Uh, hey!” That seemed to snap Aurelio out of his near-hypnotic state, thank God, “Are you ok?”

“No!”

The man couldn’t help but laugh a little at Aurelio’s exclamation. Aurelio even found himself laughing almost hysterically at the craziness of the situation. This couldn’t be real, but it is. Fuck, it’s real.

The man gestured towards a discarded laser weapon on the ground, which Aurelio clumsily grabbed. He placed the weapon over his shoulder, opting for the familiarity of his handgun. He took one last glance at the man above him, but his gaze lingered longer when their eyes met once more.

The man gave Aurelio an awkward smile and said, “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

Aurelio flashed him an equally awkward smile and walked up to the door of the museum.


End file.
